What is SEO – Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is commonly heard on the internet by many people but is poorly understood.

For a beginner’s understanding, SEO is a marketing specialty that focuses on growing visibility in non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results. It includes the technical and creative fundamentals compulsory to increase rankings and thereby bring more visitors and awareness in search engines.

In simple terms, SEO is making sure that your site is designed in a way that search engines recognize and appreciate.

This is a field which seems a lot more difficult than it is. As you will see it requires attention to a lot of different areas which sometimes overlap but rarely all mastered by the same expert.

Why should you care about SEO?

Over half the world population have access to the internet. This means you want to have your business front and center for as many as possible that uses Google to find things online. To compete today, you need to care about SEO.

For business owners, SEO traffic can be influential not only because there is a lot of it but because the traffic generated is very specific.

What does an SEO expert do?

All SEOs have the same objectives: to help a website be easily discovered by many people surfing the internet. But the methods to achieve this can differ.

Anyone working with SEO knows they have to keep up to date with all the latest tricks in SEO and to guide their customers to good results. There are agencies that will go for a cheap and effective solution, often using "cowboy tricks" or blackhat SEO. These agencies sometimes provide a quick result, but they will leave your website with long-term adverse effects.

Be careful of any SEO agency that will take your work on pure ranking results. Nobody can guarantee a top 3 result, and if they do, you should be looking for another SEO company.

Having worked on hundreds of websites, I can say that most problems start at home. Most businesses that approach me have a badly coded website and usually a lot of internal problems that hinders good rankings.

Nine out of ten times several changes to the website are necessary before any additional SEO work can be done.

Optimizes the site

A sturdy and robust SEO strategy concentrates on the technical aspect of a website. Google finds information about a particular website by crawling it, and it is the job and responsibility of SEO to make it easier for Google to find and crawl info.

A thorough review of code, HTML structure, internal linking, anchor usage, redirects, dead links, semantic markup, title tags, descriptions, page loading speed and so on is the first step of any cleanup or SEO campaign.

That sounds difficult, but WordPress optimization is worth it, as it can make quite a difference between a cleaned up and optimized website vs. a website that has not been updated for years and is filled with bad code and security holes.

Research and optimize keywords

To find what you are looking for, you enter keywords into the search engine. SEOs execute keyword search to regulate which keywords would be preeminent to aim for a given site. It also ensures it utilizes the keywords sufficiently and in the right spots in a manner called keyword optimization.

For people to have better keyword search, your keywords must:

Have a high search volume

Have low competition

Are supported by your content (keywords apply to your site)

Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool is the most widely held keyword-finding tool at the moment.

Builds links

When a trusted website links to your site, it gives away signals to Google that you are hanging out with a great firm. If this transpires too frequently, Google gets the impression that your site is a reliable site, too.

Here are a few ways you can increase your link count:

Social media

Directories

Forums

Competition

Dead links

Helps creates content (that builds links)

Great content is one of the great ways to get links. Whether it’s a video, a blog post, an image, it certainly draws in links as people visit it, share it and talk about it.

A reminder though, writing merely for search engines eventually makes your content dull and uninteresting. To escape this, it is better if you concentrate on people first, making your content as straightforward as possible and improve them for search engines.

In creating content, you must strictly pay attention to the following:

Titles

It should be catchy and must immediately draw reader’s attention.

Keywords

Select keywords that are relevant and applicable to your site.

Links

You should always ever only link your site to quality and reliable websites. Do not worry too much about "linking out" in general; Google appreciates websites that link to other related websites.

Google does not like websites that are "black holes" either. Black Holes regarding SEO refers to websites that do not link to other sites. One of the core measures in SEO is the amount and quality of backlinks your website has.

That is entirely against the spirit of the internet and having no external links on your website is not a good idea either.

Quality

Your site should contain unique content for it cannot be easily found anywhere and this will prompt users to visit your website and stay there.

Newness

You need to add content to your site that is of time-relevance. People do not want to see/read something from decades ago.

Originality

Never publish someone else’s work on your site. It creates duplicate content - which is a bad sign for Google and other search engines.

SEO is vital for sites to build traffic and be easily found by readers and potential customers. It also improves search engine rankings. It ensures a website can be found by a search engine for words and phrases appropriate to what the site is offering. In simple terms, it is a simple quality control for websites. In utilizing SEO, you should know what kind of gist readers are looking for then create a great site with great content that is easy to be shared.